[Gnome-print] [Fwd: Gnome printing issues]

[Chema Celorio <chema celorio com>]

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• From: Robert L Krawitz <rlk alum mit edu>
• To: miguel helixcode com
• CC: chema celorio com, raph acm org, gnome-hackers nuclecu unam mx
• Subject: Re: Gnome printing issues
• Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2000 22:01:07 -0400

   From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel@helixcode.com>
   Date: 11 Sep 2000 20:59:40 -0400

   The issue is that even when we can just generate a huge bitmap, pass
   the bitmap to the driver, and then let the driver generate the
   commands for the printer, this is extremely inneficient for many
   printers.

That's certainly true for PCL and PostScript printers.  Is it true for
any of the non-PostScript inkjets?  Can they do any but the most
trivial printing without rasterizing?

   If you are just printing with the default fonts (say, times/12), it
   makes more sense to ask the printer to set the text out in the printer
   font times/12 at x,y rather than dumping a bitmap.  This shows for
   large text documents.

Epson inkjets are capable of printing plain text in something that
looks like Courier 12 by just dumping the text file to the printer.
However, that's about it; anything even slightly fancier has to be
done by rasterizing the whole page.  I don't know about other families
of inkjet printers.  Lexmark Optras, of course, are true PostScript
printers.

Can any of these printers (again, other than PostScript) handle mixed
text and graphics on the same page more efficiently than just
rasterizing?

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton

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